At a Google Office-hours gathering, Google’s John Mueller answered whether there would be any ranking advantage in restoring content on the parked domain. John Mueller of Google explains how Google handles expired domain names.
Parked and expired domain names
Expired domains are domains that have been previously registered but are allowed to expire and return to the common pool for others to register.
A parking domain is a domain that has been registered but not used.
When many people buy an expired domain name from a domain name broker, what they really buy is a previously registered parked domain name.
The authority of expired domain names?
The person who asked the question wanted to know if any “permissions” left over from the parked domain would cause Google to speed up the indexing and ranking of the domain.
Although Mueller did not address the issue of website authority in his answer, he has firmly denied that Google uses any indicators of authority in the past.
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This is the problem:
“I have a domain name that has not been used for four years. My blog is doing well in its niche market. But because I don’t want to sell it, I deleted all content and parked the domain.
I want to restore its contents, but I want to take a slightly different approach.
My question is, does Google need to learn about my blog again as if it were new, or because of this old domain name, I have a better chance of becoming an authority in my niche faster than usual? “
Google’s John Mueller discusses expired domain names
Google and expired domain names
John Mueller confirmed that using expired domain names has no ranking-related advantages and explained what the next step is from an SEO perspective.
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Mueller:
“So if the content disappears for a few years, we may need to figure out what this site is and basically start over.
Therefore, from this point of view, my expectations for the bonus will not be high, because you used to have content there.
I really think you will have to rebuild it like any other website.
It’s like, if you have a company and you have closed down for four years and then reopened, then customers will remember you and say oh yes, it will be very rare that I will go to this company.
It looks completely different. They provide different things. But it once existed.
I think this kind of situation is rare in real life…if you will.
So I assume you basically start over here.
This is one of the reasons why it is usually meaningless to buy expired domain names. I hope you can get some kind of reward from using these expired domain names. “
No ranking rewards for expired domains
For those of us with 20 years or more of SEO experience, Mueller’s explanation of no reward for expired domain names is not surprising.
We already know this because it is our generation of SEO that first adopted the practice of buying expired domain names and experienced the moment when Google applied algorithm updates to deal with them.
We experienced firsthand how expired domain names can actually help websites rank higher.
Not only are they useful for rankings, but we can actually see how much PageRank they provide in the Google toolbar.
And it’s not just expired domains that contain reserved PageRank. Links to broken domains may also be the source of PageRank.
The practice is to run crawlers on popular websites and view outbound links that return 404 Page Not Found error messages.
Those 404s are links to non-existent pages and sites.
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So what SEO does is buy these domains, usually misspellings, and then redirect these domains to affiliated websites. After a few weeks, PageRank will flow, and the ranking of affiliated sites will start to rise.
These purchases of misspelled domains with a large number of inbound links and purchases of expired domains are part of the practice of recycling PageRank to help rank the site without establishing links.
They are link building shortcuts.
Google algorithm can already handle expired domain names
As early as 2003, Google discovered this approach and finally changed their link-related algorithm to reset the PageRank method of expired domain names.
For those who are not familiar with SEO, have about five years of experience, and believe in expired domain names, this can be shocking.
But Google’s algorithm did reset the PageRank and link influence of expired domain names in 2003.
I was practicing SEO at the time and I witnessed the consequences of this change.
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Google expired domain name update announcement
The announcement about resetting PageRank for expired domain names was made by a Google engineer using the WebmasterWorld nickname GoogleGuy.
Most of the time, the identity of GoogleGuy is Matt Cutts.
But other search engineers also use this alias to make announcements in the name of Google.
In a post called WebmasterWorld Good news about expired domain names, Google posted this:
“Hey, the index will be released soon, so I want to let people know what to expect from this index. Of course, it’s bigger and deeper (yes!), but we also pay more attention to algorithmic improvements for spam problems.
An improvement of this index is to better handle expired domains-when the domain expires, the domain’s authority will be reset, even if the dangling link to the expired domain is still on the network. “
Google confirmed that expired domains can still be ranked, but not because of any pre-existing links, because they are no longer counted.
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GoogleGuy wrote:
“…You can enter this domain into Google; you won’t be honored for any pre-existing links.”
GoogleGuy also pointed out that expired domain names with pre-existing penalties will still bear these penalties.
GoogleGuy recommends:
“Now the penalty can be kept on a domain. Therefore, you need to research before buying a domain name.”
PageRank reset is not limited to expired domains. The PageRank of misspelled domains is also reset.
The market for expired domain names quickly collapsed, and people almost stopped buying them.
Expired domain name purchase resurgence
About ten years later, a new generation of SEO appeared and rediscovered expired domains, but without knowing that they were no longer valid, the entire expired domain thing started from scratch, driven by unreliable anecdotal evidence.
Anecdotal evidence supporting almost all SEO practices is common. People can even find ineffective anecdotal support like spam comments, which can only point out the fact that anecdotal evidence is unreliable.
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Expired domain names do not provide any rewards or shortcuts
Google has more than 20 years of experience in handling SEO shortcuts (including expired domain names).
Anyone can buy an expired domain name to gain an advantage, and Google’s clueless idea is extreme wishful thinking.
The fact is that the SEO advantage of expired domain names disappeared in 2003.
Citation
Read Google’s 2003 statement on expired domain names
Good news about expired domain names
No SEO rewards for expired domains
Watch John Mueller explain at 35:31 minutes that expired domain names have no SEO advantage
